


See it all dissolve around you

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: Alternate Universe - Genre Twist, Catholic Character, Character of Faith, Child Death, Coping Mechanisms, F/M, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Infant Death, Loss of Faith, Mental Breakdown, Supernatural Elements, Tonal Change
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 20:18:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5469605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Mindy and Leo are killed in an accident, a grief-stricken Danny seeks a different life for himself as the one left behind, away from the cheerful cacophony of the living.</p><p>And then Mindy comes back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	See it all dissolve around you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kafuka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kafuka/gifts).



*

Danny doesn’t remember what happened that icy night in January. He doesn’t remember the page at the hospital, or the moment he knew, he only knows this: Leo is dead and Mindy is dead and he is more alone than he has ever been in his life.

It’s not like everyone doesn’t try to reach him, but Danny can’t hear them through grief that howls cold and sharp through the hollow left in his chest. His mother calls the first few weeks, when he’s still locked himself in their apartment--in _his_ , it’s _his_ apartment--and doesn’t bother coming out for any of them. After all, what could he say to them? What would they say to him that might soften the pain?

It’s his fault for not being there. He can’t even blame Mindy for being rash, because he knows the city can be dangerous, because he should have known to call her, should have known she might walk a couple blocks home with Leo when there was ice on the roads. He should have known, should have called, should have been there, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t even speaking to Mindy when it happened, too busy stinging with some shallow betrayal he’d contrived for himself when she packed up and left. Maybe if he’d swallowed his pride earlier, or if he’d been able to think what to say that she might have listened to, or if he could have been a different person entirely than the one he’s been his whole life--

Then Annette goes quiet, probably to grieve her losses, too, and the city becomes too suffocating for him to stay. Danny’s on leave and it’s not like Jeremy can’t cover his patients, and he doesn’t mean to just _leave_. Not at first. He just packs a bag and leaves in the middle of the night, drives north until he finds a motel in Massachusetts near dawn. Not far from Boston, where Mindy grew up, he thinks, just before he passes out into the flattened pillows. 

It’s as good a reason to stay there as any.

*

The job at the morgue isn’t his first choice, but he’s moved from the hotel into a renovated basement that already has its own furniture, a microwave and a hotplate in the corner. All Danny has to do is step in, like it’s an ill-fitting department store suit. But the town’s coroner needs doctors, and Danny can handle autopsies. It’s like he’s in med school again, working on cadavers in med school, but it’s better than trying to go back to delivering babies. _Everything_ makes Danny think about her and Leo, except the bodies. Death doesn’t bother him anymore, it’s having to deal with life, with the living, the bloody, squalling, kicking reminders that he’s still alive and they aren’t that bothers him. The dead are easier for him, more like who he is now.

He’s alone here, anyway, and that’s the way he wants it to be. Danny is good at being alone. He makes people uncomfortable, with all his haunts hanging around him like a despairing miasma. So, he falls into a new routine. One where he barely has to speak with anyone. The dead aren’t talking back to him, anyway. 

It takes six months after Mindy and Leo are dead and buried for them to start doing just that.

*

The first victim of the morning comes off the ice with a slack expression that Danny doesn’t linger on. And why would he? This is just work.

Danny pulls up his face mask and turns on the voice recorder with a single depression of his gloved finger on the button that lingers when he finally looks down at the dead woman. Her brown skin is cold and pallid in death, but Danny barely needs to use his underdeveloped sense of imagination to know that this woman’s complexion was once warm with a rosy undertone. It’s not at all unlike Mindy’s. What it was like before, anyway. 

With a show of stubborn determination, Danny yanks his hand away from the voice recorder and forces himself to look anywhere but the dead woman’s face. If he doesn’t look there, maybe he doesn’t have to remember. Maybe she can be a collection of clues, hints that point to the death of a person that she can no longer be associated with. Maybe, if he’s lucky. 

“Victim displays subcutaneous bruising along the left--no, right side of the body. Bruising extends down victim’s arm, looks like--like--” Danny hears his voice shudder and fade, but he clears his throat loudly. As if he has no control over his own hands, he lifts the dead woman’s hand, sees the pattern of the bruising, the distinctive impression of fingers, palms--

He doesn’t have the chance to look up at the dead woman’s face, because his eyes are watering uncontrollably. Just because the room is cold, or because the sterile, preserved smell of the morgue is the smallest bit stronger where he’s standing. A draft. Anything to explain it, because he isn’t crying. He doesn’t cry, hasn’t cried for months, has no reason to be crying--

Danny is used to the twisting deep in the pit of his stomach, and the abrupt stab in his chest that feels uncomfortably like physical pain, rather than a symptom of emotional anguish. Sometimes, he pulls himself together by thinking through all the minute chemical reactions happening in his body, why they make his heart race and his chest tighten. It helps most days.

He grabs for the edge of the table and his fingertips brush the dead woman’s body. Danny lists the chemical messengers surging in his blood: epinephrine, cortisol, seratonin, dopamine. His body trying to warn him to run away or start swinging, and trying to assure him that everything is safe. It takes a full minute, but Danny’s breathing slows and he looks down at the victim again. 

“Contusions around the victim’s neck, consistent in size with those on the victim’s arms.” 

Danny can’t do more than that right now. He leans over and stops the voice recorder, his breaths coming shallow now. Mindy--Mindy might have looked like this. She did, he knows she did, because he forced himself to go see her body, to prove to himself that it was real. 

“A morgue?” A high voice cuts straight through his thoughts, the way it always has. “Ew, Danny. _Ew._ ”

The full body shudder that rumbles through Danny’s arm feels as though it’s happening to someone else, as if he’s watching from another part of the room while his body shudders and jerks like a half-strung puppet. A stainless steel pan clatters to the floor, and his once-sterile instruments alongside it. 

There, perched on a cold, steel examination table, is Mindy. 

She’s wearing a bright, pink pencil skirt and a cream blouse with loose sleeves and frothing lace at her throat. He’d be cold it were him wearing something like that, the room is frigid, but Mindy doesn’t seem to mind. Her hair is pinned back, her legs crossed, and though her expression is twisted up in disgust, her hands held in front of her in that too-familiar gesture, Danny can see the twinkling of amusement in her eyes. She leans back, her hands splayed on the cold table, and a smirk lifts her rouged cheeks. It’s all so achingly familiar, and there, mixed with those memories of Mindy like this, whole and unblemished, are the ones where she’s cold and unresponsive, mouth slack and her cheeks streaked terrible red. 

“Is this funny to you?” 

He doesn’t know why it’s the first thing he says. Probably because he knows this isn’t real, can’t be real, or that it is, but only in the way that he doesn’t want to think too hard about. Or because it’s easier to fall back to his old habits than to believe this is anything but a hallucination. Suddenly, Danny remembers that he was once angry with Mindy, as if she somehow caused all of this, even though it’s been months since he thought that was anything approaching a reasonable response. Anger would be easier, he thinks, but he’s too tired to be angry. 

“Not really,” Mindy says, hopping from the table and circling around the edges of the room. Danny notices that she doesn’t come too close to him, as if she’s still measuring him up, figuring out what he’s going to do. He drops his hands to his sides and waits for her. She comes, peering down at the body on the table with a small pinch in the center of her forehead. The one she gets when she’s concentrating on a professional problem, not indulging in vapid chatter. 

Her expression softens a little and she reaches for the woman’s bruised cheek. Danny starts to reach out to stop her, slap her hand away from the dead woman, but then he remembers that’s _ridiculous_. Mindy is dead. Leo is dead. Whomever this woman was in life, she’s _dead._

“It’s not as bad as you think,” says Mindy, her eyes lifting from the woman’s face to Danny’s for the briefest of moments before returning her attention to the dead woman. “Dying, I mean. Even for Lisa here. Not so bad. Just another part of life.”

Mindy steps back from the body and reaches over for the voice recorder, her finger resting on the button in mimicry of Danny’s earlier movements. “You can do this, babe.” 

Then she presses down the record button, and watches him work.

*

Mindy starts following Danny around everywhere. What he first thought might be a one-off hallucination brought on by a hangover turns out to be much more than that. It frightens Danny, but Mindy--or whatever it is that looks like Mindy and walks like Mindy and sounds like Mindy--keeps her distance whenever it seems like he’s getting too nervous.

Until she doesn’t, of course. Danny would know the hallucination isn't Mindy if she didn’t come up behind him and grab his ass, shooting him a conspiratorial grin when he wheels around in place. Though she only appeared when he was alone at first, Mindy is becoming bolder as more time passes. It doesn’t take long after her first public appearance for Danny to figure out that he’s the only one who can see her, or the things she does. 

She ruffles through the gossip rags at the grocery until he agrees to buy one of them for her, and another she pleads for, prodding the cover of _People_ , which has the exclusive baby photos of Saint Kardashian-West, or whatever the kid’s name is. 

“His mom doesn’t look much like a saint,” Danny rumbles with no shortage of irritation while he throws down his bank card to pay for the meager groceries he can bring himself to buy. He doesn’t eat much these days.

A second look at the magazine, meant to be disgusted, freezes on his face when he the corner of his eye is caught on the curve of the baby’s face, and he swears it’s Leo there, staring out into the camera. Danny inhales sharply, but it feels like all the air around him has vanished into a vacuum.

“I beg your pardon, sir?” The cashier looks him up and down with nothing short of disdain before she swipes his card, and Danny clears his throat and gestures uselessly at the magazine, not really knowing what he means by it. 

“I mean--just take a look at the neckline on that--oh, whatever.” He’s done stammering out a useless answer, when he already feels his ears heating with embarrassment at just being seen with garbage like the stack of magazines. “Just run the card.” 

The cashier’s frown deepens, but she finishes ringing up his groceries and gives him his receipt without saying anything else. Danny flees the store with bags in hand, and wonders what he’s going to do with a couple of dumb magazines.

Mindy’s waiting for him, shrouded in light mist and leaning against a streetlamp, though he’s sure she was well behind him inside the store. 

“Psst,” she hisses at him, her mouth breaking into an uncontained smile, like she does when she’s about to say something that she thinks is going to be hilarious. “You got the goods, man?” 

“Yeah, I got your dumb magazines.” Danny brushes past her, his voice barely a mumble, but Mindy comes running behind him. The noise her three inch heels make on the stones isn’t the usual sharp clicking, but a soft noise, like a far off echo heard from the other end of the misty street. 

“They’re not dumb,” she calls, puffing with the effort, which Danny knows is just showboating on her part. Whether she’s a hallucination, or a ghost, or a demon sent to torture him for his many sins, her very presence is proof enough of that. 

But Mindy waits until they’re back inside his basement apartment before she grabs the magazines and retreats to the couch, putting her feet up on the tattered arms so she can read. Every now and again, whenever Danny catches himself staring dumbly at her figure, she peeps back up at him and waves, a slow smile spreading on her face. 

Mindy hasn’t told him what she is, or why she’s here. Danny searches for some blurring of the line between her and the edge of reality, some of that intangible thing that happens in his dreams, when he can’t force himself to focus hard enough on something to see it clearly. But Mindy is in sharp focus, as though she’s real, as if the accident and his life in New York were the hallucination, and this is his life. 

Then Danny turns back to putting away his groceries, and the silence in the apartment is as stifling as cotton in his ears.

*

Mindy says she doesn’t like to visit him at work--at the morgue, really--but she visits him there often enough. She has a bad habit of showing up when he really needs to concentrate, but she’s good enough not to bother him when it’s really important.

“Just trying to shake up your routine a little, babe,” she says with cotton candy sweetness, her hands folded over one knee while he works. The other swings freely from the edge of the chair she’s taken, comfortably within his line of sight if he chooses to look up at all. 

“Yeah, well, maybe I don’t want my routine shaken up,” Danny sputters, though the voice recorder is still on. He’ll have to stop the tape recorder if he wants to talk to her, since he can’t really edit the recordings. Mindy’s voice can’t be recorded, anyway. He’s checked before, not really expecting to find evidence of his conversations with his dead girlfriend. Dead ex-girlfriend. 

More disturbing is that not all of _Danny’s_ end of the conversation is recorded, either. The playback from the times he forgets to turn off the voice recorder is mostly silence, with occasional outbursts that are nonsense without the context of his full conversation with Mindy. 

Mindy winks at him. “No way. Everyone wants their routine shaken up a little. It’s the number one red hot sex tip from last month’s Cosmo.” 

Danny hasn’t thought about sex in months. Definitely not since Mindy died, though he’d been too preoccupied with her leaving him before that to think a whole lot about sex then, either. 

“While we’re on the subject of shaking up routines,” Danny interjects roughly, his voice louder than he means it to be. It’s just an old habit, the loudmouth New York Italian-American Staten Island guy, shouting to get his point heard across the din of his own thoughts. “You’re palling around all the time here. How come you never bring Leo to these little family reunions?” 

Mindy’s back straightens and Danny thinks he’s finally offended her. She certainly has that flustered expression that makes her lips twitch and her eyes darken, thinking of what kind of ammunition to sling back at him. Instead, her voice is calm and clear when she says, “Leo’s fine, Danny.” 

Then, as if she’s remembered that she’s playing the role of a celebrity-obsessed airhead, her face relaxes back into the familiar, harmless smile. “He’s in, like, baby heaven or whatever. You had him baptized, don’t worry about it.”

Something in Danny’s head thuds into place for the first time, something that actually freezes his feet to the floor, his heart still as a stone in his breast. 

“I had him baptized,” he mumbles, realizing that he hasn’t thought about God, hasn’t never even once considered praying about any of this, for Mindy and Leo’s souls, or for God to help him get past his grief. Danny remembers praying for Mindy to convert, to just get her damn baptism done so he could be good and _sure_ that they were playing by the rules and might go to heaven. He remembers obsessing about it, losing sleep about it, but that all seems so far away that Danny can’t even recognize himself in that anxiety. 

Danny believed in God before, in that other life, but maybe that’s another thing that’s different about the Danny Castellano who lives in Massachusetts and performs autopsies and drinks cheap whisky until he falls asleep on his couch, clutching a battered photo of Mindy and their dead son. Maybe God doesn’t care that his baby son is dead, that he can’t get through a day without the grief of it eating away in his chest like acid. 

Maybe he doesn’t believe in God anymore. Maybe he’s okay with that. 

“He’s _fine_ , Danny,” Mindy repeats, like he didn’t hear her before, and her hand goes to his bicep, stopping short of actually touching him. Danny stares down at her, wishing with his whole being that he could touch her face, bend down and kiss her, but he couldn’t even do that when she died.

Instead, he pulls himself away, returning his attention to the body in front of him. Sensing that the conversation is over, Mindy retreats to his desk chair and doesn’t say anything else for the rest of the day, though Danny senses her there the whole time, as if she’s waiting to say something important.

*

Danny dreams about Leo a few nights later. He dreams vividly about his son growing into a smart-mouthed teenager, a handsome young man with the same loose wave in his hair and crinkling around his dark eyes that Danny has. His smiling laugh is all Mindy, and Danny can’t help smiling when he sees him.

When he reaches for him in the dream, though, the boy becomes the blurred-edge stuff of dreams, slipping just beyond Danny’s outstretched fingers. Leo doesn’t speak, he just gives Danny an apologetic smile before walking away and leaving him alone again.

*

He goes to the church the next day, right when he leaves work, and walks in wearing a pair of clean scrubs. Danny is actually a little surprised that Mindy is already waiting for him inside the sanctuary, sitting a few pews from the back while he approaches the confessional with his hands shaking. He doesn’t know why, Danny just thought that maybe the church building would keep her out, or she might be uncomfortable.

Someone is in the other side, Danny can hear the priest shifting around the wooden box before a wooden panel slides back and all he sees is a dimly-lit pair of grey eyes. 

“Father, forgive me,” he begins, an old recitation he learned by hearing before he learned to read. Danny doesn’t finish it, though, choosing to lean back against the uncomfortably hard wooden bench. 

“I need help,” he admits instead, and his voice so soft that even he barely hears it. If there is a God, though, Danny guesses that He’ll hear it. 

“I’m sorry?” The priest--a Father Thomas, according to the sign in front of the church--scuffles against the wood again, fumbling for a book. The priest’s voice is high and young, probably some not more than thirty. Too young to understand what Danny’s going to load off onto him.

It’s a good thing Danny doesn’t even know where to start. He sits in silence for a long time, thinking how to explain the last nine months. Longer, even, to try and explain Mindy, what she was to him, and Leo, how it all fits into a life wasting away. Father Thomas shuffles around again, and Danny leans forward to rest his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees. 

“Father, do you believe in ghosts?”

The sputtering noise from the darkness is answer enough for Danny, but Father Thomas stammers a few syllables together. “I beg your pardon?”

“Ghosts,” Danny repeats, feeling stupid for asking. He continues, “Do you think there’s such a thing as being haunted by a ghost?” 

The noise that comes from the other side is noncommittal, but Danny doesn’t mind letting the man have a minute to think. He didn’t think much about ghosts before Mindy appeared, he can’t blame him for needing a minute. Now that he’s started, though, Danny can’t stop.

“My ex-fiancee died in New York one night in January, hit by a car while crossing the street. She was walking home with our son. There was ice. I know it wasn’t--I thought at first maybe she could have prevented it, but I really thought I should have prevented it. It was no one’s fault, I guess.” Danny falls against the partition between them, the cool iron on his temple. 

“I’ve been seeing her around lately. Like a ghost. She follows me around, talks to me, acts like nothing happened.” He hesitates, but he makes himself continue. “She left me. Maybe a month before it happened. Moved back to her place.”

If the priest was surprised before, it’s nothing like what he must be feeling now. Danny takes some grim satisfaction knowing that, but the priest finds his voice.

“Grief can be difficult on the faithful,” the priest says slowly, his voice barely rising loud enough for Danny to hear. “The evil of the world wears on them. Have you spoken… with anyone about this?”

“Just you, Father,” Danny says, his voice heavy with dissatisfaction. The priest thinks he’s cracking up. Danny thinks he might be, too. 

“Perhaps you might…?” Father Thomas would rather be finished with him, but Danny has so much more he wants to say. Now that he’s back in the familiar space of the confessional, there are a thousand things he wants to confess. How he drinks too much, how he indulged in pride and jealousy and almost ruined Mindy’s life for it, how he doesn’t think he believes in God anymore. 

Danny wants to pour it all out onto this young priest, but he just clamps his mouth shut and fumbles for the latch on the wooden door. He doesn’t want to wait around for absolution. He needs to get out of here. 

“Thanks, Father,” he mumbles, shoving the old door open and striding out of the confessional, jamming his hands into the pockets of his jacket as he walks down the center aisle of the church. Mindy is waiting in the pews, but she seems genuinely surprised to see him burst out of the confessional, following half a step behind him.

“Danny,” she says insistently, and he doesn’t miss that her voice is barely a hushed whisper, as if she’s trying to be respectful. It’s so absurd, so mismatched with his own feelings, but Danny just bursts out into the night air with his hands clenching around the silken fabric of his jacket, and he doesn’t say anything back to her.

Mindy, of course, keeps up easily. “What happened back there?” Her voice is higher than usual, piqued with concern, but she doesn’t reach for his arm to stop him, because it won’t do any good if she’s not real. 

“Just leave me alone for once,” Danny hisses, barely opening his mouth to speak. He hardly has to shove out the words before he regrets them, but Mindy stops in the middle of the sidewalk with an openly astonished expression. He shrugs himself deeper into his jacket and tries not to look back at her, and Mindy doesn’t follow.

*

Danny doesn’t sleep for the next two nights, staying up alone in his misery to look at old photographs, drink, and ignore emails from his Ma about renting the Manhattan apartment. Mindy is conspicuously absent, but it’s not much of a relief, since he finds himself wondering if he’s upset her and how he’ll manage to apologize to her before he remembers what reality is.

Before long, though, he falls back into his routine of working and grieving and avoiding the living, and Mindy comes back with it. She appears next to his car one night after work, about two weeks after he snapped at her outside the church. Like so many things, like her leaving him and the vile, jealous things he said to her when she did, Mindy seems to pretend she doesn’t remember what he said then, which seems uncharacteristic for someone who was so fixated on being _right_ all the time when she was alive. 

Nevertheless, Mindy never mentions it again, and neither does Danny.

*

“Are you real?”

He is sprawled across his couch, his feet up on the coffee table the way that Mindy used to do. It bothered him then, her feet shoving around his neatly-arranged things the way she shoved around his neatly-arranged life. It just doesn’t matter much anymore. Not like it used to. 

Mindy is perched in an arm chair, flipping through a magazine. Danny’s vision swims a little. He ought to drink some water, flush out a little of the whisky before he has another drink, but he can’t do it, so he just flops bodily back into the cushions and closes his eyes. The world spins off its axis until he opens them again, boring a hole into the ceiling rather than look over to see Mindy staring back at him. 

It’s been months since Mindy appeared, and it feels like she’s always been here. Like she never left, even. Danny is comfortable with it now, with his life being what it is now. As if he has a choice, anyway. 

“What kind of question is _that?_ ” The sound of pages turning fills the rest of the silence he’s left with his question. 

Ever since going to see Father Thomas, Danny has wondered what’s happening to him. Maybe he is cracking up, shoved past the brink out of some combination of grief and isolation. But maybe there’s something more to it, something supernatural that the pragmatic priest didn’t think was possible. Who would? Danny wouldn’t put it past Mindy to haunt him out of spite. He tells her so blearily, and listens as she ruffles her magazine in his direction. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, with an audible pout. “I thought we were having a nice evening together, _Danny_. But since I’m only here out of spite--” 

“I’ve just been thinking about it,” he says, spreading his arms wide. The motion puts him off balance, so he has to shift his weight back into the couch to keep from rolling off. “And either you’re a figment of my imagination, or you’re a temptation from the Devil.”

“ _Or_ ,” Mindy interrupts before he can go much further than that, forcefully flipping a page in her magazine. “I might be the beautiful spirit of the woman you loved who tragically passed away, selflessly staying by your side in your time of need.”

“See?” Danny lifts his empty highball glass toward the corner she’s sitting in. “That sounds demonic to me. I should call Father Thomas for an exorcism.”

Mindy lifts a hand toward him in annoyed dismissal, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. Danny turns his head, craning toward her so he can see the violent pink color of her polished fingernails, or any other part of her.

“That won’t work for me,” she insists, waving her hand back and forth. “I will _not_ be projectile vomiting anywhere. That’s some Exorcist shit. I’m classy. I don’t do that.”

“That’s not how it goes,” Danny groans, rubbing his hands over his face in mock annoyance. 

Irritation at how little she knows, how shallow her knowledge is, maybe that’s what he might have felt like before. Arguing with Mindy about trivial bullshit for the rest of his life is how it was supposed to be, but it was never supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be babies, years of family vacations and holidays and bickering all the way to their bedroom, pulling their clothes off and grabbing for the other the whole way. The thought swells in his gut, flipping it around with the alcohol there.

“Danny.” 

When he looks up, Mindy is standing near the arm of the couch, her face haloed by the soft light from the lamp behind her. Danny stares up at her and he can’t help it: his face breaks into a slow smile. He forgets sometimes; he likes to forget that Mindy is dead, Leo with her, and that he is the one they’ve left behind. He likes to forget that they weren’t even _together_ when he got the call from the hospital, and only because the ER doctor on call recognized Mindy, recognized Leo, and knew to call Danny.

Some nights, he just wants to forget it all and pretend this is real life, happily ever after for the both of them, just like he hoped.

Mindy bends forward over him, her hair forming a curtain around his head when she comes in closer to him. Her mouth hovers near his, close enough that Danny is sure he can feel the puff of her breath on his lips. Danny can almost taste the breath mints she used to chew like candy and lose himself in the heady scent of her perfume and her shampoo cut with the sterile antibiotic soap she used before surgery. It would be easy to let himself forget. 

“Danny,” Mindy repeats, her voice softer still, as though she’s telling him a secret he won’t want to hear. “You can’t exorcise a ghost you want to keep around.”

*

Work keeps him busy, because he’s good and because the coroner’s office is short of medical examiners. His workload has been steadily increasing for the last few months, but Danny doesn’t mind. It’s easier to work through the anniversary of Leo and Mindy’s deaths than to sit at home doing what he’s been doing for the last year, and that’s what he does. There’s Mindy around, too, and that makes it a little bit easier, even if she isn’t as obviously stricken with grief.

So, Danny just doesn’t stop after that, until March is almost over and he’s crashing through the door of his apartment so heavy with exhaustion that he forgets to pull back the covers when he falls into bed at the end of his shift.

He slips immediately into dreamless sleep, but the room is dark when he wakes up with a streak of dried saliva on his cheek, where he drooled on the pillow. The red numbers of the alarm clock tell him that it’s almost three in the morning when Danny rolls over with a soft groan. He feels like he’s been clubbed over the head. 

“You should see a doctor.” 

It’s Mindy again. She’s been scarce since he’s been working so much, and Danny can barely make her out between the darkness and the crust of sleep on his eyes. When he scrubs his eyes clean and looks again, she’s perched in the chair in the corner of the room in a pair of patterned flannel pajamas and her hair braided over one shoulder. 

“I don’t need a doctor,” Danny protests, pushing himself up on weak arms. “I _am_ a doctor.”

“Then you know better.” Mindy is somber now, but her voice is heavy with concern, perhaps for the first time. “You need to get better, so you can go back to New York.” 

“I’m not going back to New York.” The words come so fast that Danny doesn’t even realize that he means them until they’re already out, hanging in the stale air of his basement apartment. In Massachusetts, where he’ll stay. 

“Then why won’t you rent out your apartment?” Mindy flips her braid over her shoulder and crosses her leg over her other knee, looking far more reasonable than she has any right to.

“What do you care?” Danny waves an arm at her and slumps back into his pillow. He won’t get back to sleep, not for a couple hours, when it’s time for him to be waking up. “You kept your apartment. I’ll do whatever I want with mine.”

“Well,” says Mindy, dismissing him with a razor-sharp edge in her voice. “You’ve got me there, smart guy.” But she doesn’t move from the chair, though Danny realizes with breathtaking force how badly he’s needed even this unusual contact with her, and how badly it’s fucking up his life. Like always.

“Come here,” he breathes, peering out at her through the darkness. “Just--just come here.”

She does, climbing up onto the bed and scooting toward him on her knees. There are no indentations on the mattress for weight she does not have, but she cushions her head on the pillow next to his, one arm tucked underneath her. The other extends across the bed toward him, leaving Danny staring at the last few inches as though they’re miles. Finally, he rests his hand next to hers, not quite to the place where they might touch, and looks back up to her face. 

“I’m sorry.” Danny isn’t completely sure what he’s apologizing for, or who he’s apologizing to. He’s still not sure whether he thinks Mindy is real, or just a figment of his imagination now that he’s beyond helping. All her knows is that he has a lot of things to apologize for, that he did her wrong, and that he will never actually be able to make it up to her, or even be sure that she hears him now. 

Mindy’s face softens into a real smile, one that implies nothing but her own simple happiness, and Danny would trade anything in the world for the chance to have it all back again. Imperfect as it was, it all seems too precious to have wasted the way he did.

“I don’t want you to be so lost in this that you forget that you’re still alive.” She makes an aborted motion like she wants to rap the back of her hand against his chest before thinking otherwise. Her expression loses none of its tenderness when she continues with a conspiratorial grin. “I’ve got a lot of vicarious living I plan to do through you, buddy, and this town is _so_ boring.”

Danny laughs, the quietest noise trembling like an earthquake inside his chest. He can’t remember the last time he laughed at all, even this tiny thing. “I hope you’re not counting on me to go out like you did.” 

Mindy winks at him, allowing them to fall into companionable silence for a few minutes before Danny clears his throat and looks down at the gulf of inches between their hands. He doesn’t know how to ask what he wants to know, but he screws up his courage and swallows a lump.

“Will it always be like this?” He means the haunting, or whatever she is, but Mindy cocks her eyebrow up a little. 

“I don’t think so,” she says cautiously. “You’re already getting there. You never referred to me in the past tense before.”

Danny starts to argue the point--it’s not like he doesn’t know she’s dead and he’s crazy--before he realizes that she doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing. Maybe it’s not. He clears his throat and stares at her hand before pressing on.

“What about you? Do you go away, too?”

Mindy only smiles at him, her eyes tinged in sadness, the way Leo’s were when Danny met him in a dream. Impulsively, he rests his hand on top of hers, but there’s nothing there and his hand slides through hers to rest on the air-chilled blanket. Danny doesn’t know what he expected, but he’s disappointed all the same. 

Still, Mindy hovers her hand over his, not quite touching, and he falls asleep like that, staring at Mindy’s hair on the pillow, her eyes fluttering with something like sleep, and her fingers almost touching his. 

Almost, just not quite.

*

Mindy comes around a little less when spring hits in Massachusetts. If Danny asks her about it, she just tells him that she’s been _out_ with a wink and a grin and a quick subject change about when he’ll pick up the next _OK!_ magazine. But since he doesn’t know where ghosts go, he just doesn’t press the issue.

By late May, everything’s bloomed and is headed for the sort of vivid green that Danny barely noticed when he came to Massachusetts the year before. The world seems alarmingly _alive_ here, more intensely, more sharply real than it has in months. It’s almost painful, like the stab of pain that comes when he comes from darkness into bright daylight. It’s almost too much. 

Danny goes back to New York.

It’s only for a week, give or take a few days. He has personal leave that he keeps forgetting to take, and he’s been running long enough. At least, that’s what Mindy tells him repeatedly on the drive back to New York, before she finally falls silent as the craggy outline of the city appears on the horizon. Danny barely knows how to feel about it, torn up between homesickness and reliving the pain of losing Leo. 

Beside him, Mindy begins to cry. She blots at her eyes frantically, waving her hands in front of her eyes.

“No, no, no,” she says quickly, her eyes staring resolutely at the padded ceiling of Danny’s car. “I _finally_ got that Adele eyeliner flip thing down.” She’s lying of course, and Danny almost reaches out to grab her hand before he remembers that there’s nothing to grasp. 

“It’s not that big of a deal,” he blusters, rolling his eyes in the hope that will make Mindy happy. She swallows down the last of her tears and crosses her arms over her chest. “It’s just New York.” 

“Yeah, Danny, it’s _only_ the greatest place on Earth that I haven’t seen in over a year.”

“Whatever,” he says, with the corners of his mouth tipped up.

*

Annette cries when Danny knocks on the door. Of course she does, Danny thinks, allowing himself to be pulled into the house while his mother talks at him. Mindy hangs back a little, but she’s there at the corner of his vision every time he turns to look for her. She does that a lot while Danny is in New York, only falling into step next to him when he’s actually alone, or just before he falls asleep.

On the third day, his Ma looks up at him over the breakfast table and clears her throat. She’s been screwing up the courage for this, whatever it is, for as long as he’s been home. 

Danny sets down his coffee cup. “What is it, Ma?”

“What did you come home for, Danny?” Annette fiddles with a string on the sleeve of her shirt for a moment, as though she’s afraid of the answer he’ll give. “You’ve been gone _so_ long, I thought you weren’t ever coming back.”

Danny has to decide, but he looks down at his plate instead. He told Mindy he wasn’t coming back to New York, but being there, being _home_ , isn’t as painful as he thought it might be. He came to New York to deal with the apartment, sell everything that was left, and forget it all forever. 

“I thought I might rent the apartment,” he finally tells her, forcing a decisive tone over the words. 

“Do you like it up there? The--the mortician job?” 

“Medical examiner, Ma,” he corrects, patient as he’s ever been, and tries to smile. The returning smile Annette flashes him is a little watery, but she nods and starts toying with her beaded necklace instead. 

“You like it?” That’s the point of what she’s asking, the question that Danny doesn’t want to answer. His eyes flick to the corner, where Mindy watches from the doorway with her mouth in a tense frown. 

“I like it well enough,” Danny finally answers, since it’s not quite a lie. He doesn’t like much these days. It’s not really much better than anything else he’s wanted to do. 

Annette sighs, standing and collecting dishes from the table. Just before she leaves for the kitchen, she cocks her head to the side and looks at Danny with a curious expression he doesn’t even know how to read anymore.

“This isn’t what Mindy would have wanted for you, Danny.” She moves the plates into a single stack, but she doesn’t look away, even when the corners of her eyes glisten with more tears. She’s not over it, either. “It’s not what she would have done if it had been you and Leo.” 

“I know,” Danny answers savagely, because he doesn’t want his Ma to cry any more than he wants to cry in front of her. “I know, because she’s told--” 

He winces, tries to recover, but Danny just shoves himself to his feet, scrubbing his hands up and down over his face. “I know. Thanks for breakfast, Ma. I’m going to head to the apartment.”

Mindy is gone when he comes out to the living room with his keys in his hand, though he expects her to show up anytime now. Danny gets all the way downtown before he changes his mind and heads to the old Shulman and Associates office. He has no idea if the practice is still there, but when it is--midwives a floor up and everything--he feels an easing of tension in his chest, that this thing is still the same.

Danny actually makes it through the doors, is still looking around at the utterly unchanged office, before he realizes that the room is absent of its usual squawking banter. Everyone is silent, and they’re staring at him. 

“I, uh,” Danny stammers, looking quickly over his shoulder, but he’s alone walking through the door. Even Mindy is missing here. He turns back to the room, where Morgan watches him with his eyes wide and Tamra actually dropped her Starbucks. “Hey, everybody.”

And that’s the end of the quiet. Jeremy appears from the door of his office and his face doesn’t even crumple into anger for Danny’s abandonment, he just folds his arms around him and pretends he isn’t crying. Morgan, on the other hand, weeps openly, babbling into Danny’s shoulder. 

When the noise has died down and Danny can deal with the flood of other people’s emotions, he is permitted to take a seat in the conference room with a cup of coffee shoved into his hand. Jeremy takes a seat across from him and Danny is reminded of the same body language Annette had that morning, and every other morning since he came to New York. The sense that everyone’s treating him with kid gloves, like they did before he left for Massachusetts.

Danny braces himself to tell Jeremy he’s fine, like he’s told everyone that he’s fine since he came back, and wonders when he started doing that. When he stopped believing nothing was ever going to be fine again. 

But instead of asking how he’s doing, Jeremy breaks into a bittersweet smile. “I didn’t think you were ever coming back, Danny.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” he says, leaning back in the chair. “I just came to town to--I guess shove all that stuff into storage and rent the apartment.” 

Jeremy clears his throat. He was never subtle about his feelings, when he wants to ask a thousand questions but is restraining himself. “You could come back. Here, I mean. We’d still have you. Some of your old patients are still around.”

“Mrs. Proctor still asking about me?” Danny’s mouth twitches into a smile, remembering the woman who gushed at him about how _lucky_ Mindy was. How beautiful Leo turned out. For once, the thought doesn’t make him ache as badly. 

“Among others.” Jeremy relaxes a little, folding his hands in front of him. “It’s all still here, Danny. Whenever you want it back.”

“I can’t go back to who I was.” Danny tries to keep his voice light, but even without Mindy around him, echoing his every step, every block in New York is haunted by a thousand memories of her. “I can’t just walk back into my life like nothing changed.”

“No,” Jeremy agrees, checking his watch before scraping back in his chair and pulling himself to his feet. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t pick up the one you left here and keep going with it. Think about it.”

Danny crosses his arms, but he doesn’t refuse this time. He shakes his head. “Maybe,” he says flatly, nodding at Jeremy when he leaves him there in the kitchen. 

“Maybe,” he repeats a moment later, with his eyes on the street below.

*

Danny puts off the trip to the apartment another few days, and decides to stay a little longer. It’s not like he hasn’t got the leave up in Massachusetts, anyway.

Some days he just walks around the old neighborhood, and Mindy comes along when he does. He tells her stories in a quiet story, about Skinny Matty and Gio up at the corner, who gave him quarter candies anytime he came in with an A on his report card. How he patted him heavily on the back and told him he was too big for their little neighborhood, a doctor with a fancy practice and a big apartment. 

“It takes a village,” Mindy remarks one day, her hands clasped behind her back when Danny comes back out from Gio’s corner store with a butter rum toffee burning a hole in his jeans. “Is this what you wanted for us?” 

Danny quirks an eyebrow at her, jams his hands into his pockets and looks up at the bleached-out sky. “Nah. You wouldn’t have liked it out here.”

Mindy is quiet all the way back to his Ma’s house--a fucking miracle, if Danny’s ever seen one. She reappears when he comes up to his old bedroom, her legs crossed and looking out of place here, as always. 

“You could move back to Staten Island,” she suggests in the voice that says she’s been thinking about it. “Annette would like it. Take the ferry in every day. You could rent the apartment out so you don’t have to look at it.”

It’s an appealing thought, coming back to where it all began for him. A fresh start in a familiar and comfortable place. Danny takes the candy out of his pocket and rolls it around in his palm for a minute before setting it on the dresser. He could stay here, but would it be any different than what he’s been doing for the last year?

“No,” he says simply. “I can’t do that.”

That night, he goes to the apartment in the city.

*

It’s exactly the same as Danny remembers it, which means that Annette must have come to clean sometime after he left. Danny thinks of his mother coming to the apartment every week, walking through the ruins of her son’s life and keeping it tidy for him.

Danny sets his keys on the counter and stares at every inch of it. A few of Leo’s toys are still around. A pacifier on the coffee table. A set of wooden blocks stacked neatly next to the window. There is nothing of Mindy here, since she took her things and left him with nothing but a few shredded remnants that Danny remembers throwing away in a fit of pique. 

Nothing except her, of course. 

Mindy slides from the bedroom in a sundress the buttery color of sunshine, her sandals not-slapping on the wooden floor. 

“It’s exactly how I left it,” he says stupidly. 

“Cleaner,” Mindy quips, sliding her fingertips along a bookshelf. Her fingers leave no tracks in the light film of dust, but Danny watches them all the same. 

Everything becomes too heavy for him, and Danny slumps into his old couch. Very slowly, deliberately, Mindy settles into the hollow in his arm. Her cheek rests on her hand, which rests in turn on his chest. Danny can’t feel her, but there’s a prickling sensation wherever he touches her. 

“It’s already a little better, Danny,” she breathes, leaving not even the faintest puff of air for him. Without her speaking, Danny knows what she’s going to say, and that it scares him. He’s been running, living an unlife with a ghost. He isn’t ready, doesn’t want to be ready, is too afraid to believe he’s ready to come home. To live in the place where his son died, to acknowledge that _Mindy is dead._

Mindy lifts her face up toward his. “You can tell, right?” 

“Yeah,” he answers, not quite choking on the syllable. 

“Don’t worry so much,” she says, laying her head back on his chest. “You’re already a little better.”

* _Coda_ *

Danny sends notice back to his landlord in Massachusetts that he’s leaving the same day he quits the job at the morgue. There’s not much to leave behind in Massachusetts, so he doesn’t carry anything back.

Eleven days after he moves back into his old apartment, Danny delivers his first baby in a year and a half in the same hospital Leo died in. Through the haze of unshed tears, Danny thinks he sees Mindy there, watching from the corner of the room. When he blinks, though, it’s just the anesthesiologist pulling her mask from her face. 

He realizes, scrubbing clean outside surgery, that he hasn’t seen her in a while. Not since the first night back in the apartment, when she watched him change the sheets and rearrange the bedroom furniture, trading quips and laughing like nothing has changed at all. Ten days and--well, it’s not like Danny has any proof that she was ever real at all. 

It’s three days after that Danny finds himself standing in her old office, _his_ new office. 

“All right, Min,” he says to nothing all, shuffling his papers to the side of her old desk. “Let’s get back to work.” 

Surely the answering puff of warm air by his ear is only a trick of the ventilation.


End file.
